As far as arguments about community, Shopify IS the community by virtue of being the ones putting up pretty much all the money to keep this ship afloat.
If you don't have skin in the game your positions won't be taken seriously.
Depending on your point of view, Sidekiq either turned their back on the community or tried to start a coup by pulling funding just so they could morally grandstand.
Andre's removal is easily justifiable by his own (lengthy history of) sketchy behavior.
Since when is "open source" something businesses shouldn't be allowed to get value from or even have a stake in? These things are MIT licensed. That's free as in speech AND beer. If you don't like the freedoms of the license and how other people use them, don't use the license. If you don't like someone's stewardship, fork and maintain your own.
Shopify paying for infrastructure related to Ruby is an investment, not charity. Hosting gems costs money and a healthy community depends on that gem hosting. Spotify, in turn, depends on that healthy community to produce and maintain gems, train future employees, stuff like that. They’re not paying that money for fun, it is to protect their interests.
And all of the above would be true even if the OSS committee wasn’t 100% Shopify affiliated. That’s gravy.
Yes, I do. All hardware and bandwidth are donated by Fastly and AWS so it costs RC nothing. Their expenses were $20,000/mo for 24/7 ops coverage: $2000/mo for 6 people and $8000/mo for service maintenance (e.g. db and software upgrades). So $240,000/yr, not "millions".
You can't unilaterally declare someone "sketchy" and then kick them out in the name of conveience.
People having concerns about Andre's behavior around his money and his open source contributions can't even be called an open secret.
The narrative that one side of this is pushing that this is some little guys vs evil corporate overlords problem is short-circuiting so many peoples' ability to rationalize about this topic.
This is about the personal failings to communicate and organize among a very small group of highly skilled, highly productive people. It's also about how they have fallen into camps and try to apply institutional and social leverage in order to influence millions of bystanders in order to maintain/wrest control. Each credibly accusing the other of doing it for their own benefit.
Nobody is in the right here. If you can't engage with that as your starting point, you aren't serious about this conversation and are just spouting one side's propaganda.
In the aftermath us bystanders are left wanting either stability or revolution. Revolutions generally aren't good for anyone. Especially the people who want it the most.
Not an accurate characterization.
There are some people who do feel this way. But it's not everyone, by a long shot.
You are right that this ten year long interpersonal beef is ultimately at the root of all of this.
I think it's fairer to say that if you know him and you are in the community than you know that these opinions of him are had. That is not normal.
I also want to make it clear that there is a separation here. I do not think that Andre is a malicious or bad person. I just have questions about his decision-making based on things he's said & actions that he's taken and that leads me to think that he is untrustworthy. Not in the "will steal from me" sense but in the "will fuck up shit that I care about" sense (which ultimately he did, at least partly, whether through direct actions or poorly maintained relationships with key people). I work with this kind of infrastructure though and that's the kind of attitude that you want to have towards people to be able to do this job effectively. I don't trust a lot of people -- I want any access they have to be out in the open, limited to what's needed, etc. Governance of the project/organization was obviously a shit-show.
When I say that it's obvious to cut ties with him, I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone responsible for a high-profile project. I would make that decision 10 times out of 10 without regret. They still absolutely bungled the crap out of how that went down.
Also, I hate that this crap gets associated with the "Ruby Community". It's really just a subset of the western Ruby ecosystem that cares about foundations and events and semi-social functions. Ruby's core and a whole ecosystem of people working on and around Ruby couldn't give a crap about any of this and it's all just a massive inconvenience. Meanwhile on boards like this everyone is planting their flags and trying to exploit chaos to create change in critical services that people absolutely depend on.
I've known him personally for years and find him perfectly fine as a person. The Rubygems maintainers worked with him for the past decade without issue. Until you cite actual issues, not vague "concerns", you're just spreading FUD and innuendo.
Don't pretend like I'm some nutter flinging wild accusations when primary and secondary actors in this story literally voiced these concerns in emails during this event.
Anyone who has been following this saga and actually cares knows because they read it already.
It appears unfair. That's the extent of my rationale. I've not seen any concrete evidence to draw any further conclusion than this. If you're managing a project and you're not cognizant of this, you probably shouldn't be managing projects; in particular, you should stay away from open source projects with a large base of volunteer contributors.
> Nobody is in the right here.
So, they went through all of this, made themselves look bad, cast tons of aspersions, and in the end, they weren't even in the right? This seems a shabby defense.
> are just spouting one side's propaganda.
I don't care about one side or the other. You see this giant crater left by these decisions though? Yea.. that's the problem.